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  • luke
    Senior Member
    • Mar 2011
    • 136

    Originally posted by Faust View Post
    You should read The Grapes of Wrath, if you haven't already. Makes you want to go out and kill some Republicans.
    living in indiana for 20 years already did this to me.

    we didn't read that one in school, either. i feel as if i missed out on tons of great literature during those years and need to catch up. i can't tell if i'm glad i didn't read those when i was younger so i can read them at a more appreciative age or not.

    Comment

    • several_girls
      Senior Member
      • Nov 2010
      • 218

      I recently finished Infinite Jest. [smug]

      Haven't read something quite on that level since Pynchon. I highly recommend giving it at least a look. Wallace does a little proselytizing, but I think that's to be expected in most novels. He was unexpectedly direct on some subjects, though. This may or may not be your bag but I thought I was reading a personal essay at times. And it is, in many ways. Regardless, his treatment of topics like mental illness, suicide, drug addiction and sobriety are remarkable.

      Comment

      • viv1984viv
        Senior Member
        • Feb 2008
        • 194

        Originally posted by trentk View Post
        A little note about Negarestani, since I take it you're reading his essay.

        I'm not sure that he exists. I won't say too much, because:
        1. This is only a suspicion.
        2. Too much commentary on his possible inexistence would spoil his book, Cyclonopedia. The scene of action in his book, isn't properly confined to the book. Its more about blurring your distinction between fact and reality and sending you on a paranoid search to find whether or not Negarestani exists. Instead of describing fictional situations and generating affects based on the readers reaction to these situations, he generates real situations, such that one suspects parallels in the text. For example, you'll read about something like ()hole complex (with an evaporative "w"), and you can't quite tell whether its a real theory, or whether he's just screwing with your suspicions as to his inexistence. I guess I would say this its borderline-ficticious philosophy as opposed to philosophical fiction. Its philosophy that allows you to experience the concepts while, or sometimes before they're explicitly created. Its equal parts Deleuze, Nick Land, Necronomican, and morbid biology textbook.

        Maybe this will clear things up... or further confuse you.


        edit: paging viv1984viv: does Negarestani exist? Is he as fake as the root of his last name indicates? Is he Nick Land? Is he a group of people associated with the CCRU?
        Yes he exists.....but define 'exist' - nah seriously, he's real, he's done video link lectures before now and I email him so yeah, he's real.

        I posted that video on my blog some time back http://notesfromthevomitorium.blogsp...urbanomix.html
        quality video...

        Also regarding nupta contagioso see here http://www.stylezeitgeist.com/forums...d.php?p=271260

        That essay in Collapse is one of my favourites. As you can gather.

        I'm looking at Art more now and kicked off this blog
        A virtual communal space for Goldsmiths Aural and Visual Cultures students to log, exchange, document and communicate.


        DFW will wait until I've finished my course, currently juggling all my texts with Crime and Punishment...
        Notes from the Vomitorium - The Nerve Of It -

        Comment

        • sinbad
          Senior Member
          • Dec 2009
          • 153

          Last week, my friends has brought the book SOCIALISM TODAY to me.

          I just know it This is a book that people are not occupied In my country. Since 1977.
          ART IS WHAT YOU MAKE OF IT, NOT WHAT OTHERS TELL YOU IT IS.

          Comment

          • olethomas
            Senior Member
            • Dec 2010
            • 118

            the man and his symbols by carl gustav jung
            a wonderful view on a suspicious theory/hypothesis of psychoanalysis. loving it.

            Comment

            • trentk
              Senior Member
              • Oct 2010
              • 709


              "He described this initial impetus as like discovering that they both were looking at the same intriguing specific tropical fish, with attempts to understand it leading to a huge ferocious formalism he characterizes as a shark that leapt out of the tank."

              Comment

              • Haven
                Senior Member
                • Oct 2011
                • 116

                Just finished the munk who sold his ferrari by Robin Sharma. quite an easily digested book but nonetheless a good read.

                Comment

                • asdf123
                  Member
                  • Jan 2010
                  • 49

                  Reading Moscow-Petushki by Venedict Yerofeyev.
                  I can really recommend it.

                  Comment

                  • Faust
                    kitsch killer
                    • Sep 2006
                    • 37852

                    /\ In English?
                    Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

                    StyleZeitgeist Magazine

                    Comment

                    • asdf123
                      Member
                      • Jan 2010
                      • 49

                      Originally posted by Faust View Post
                      /\ In English?
                      In Polish. Unfortunately my Russian is not as good to get through this book.

                      Comment

                      • Faust
                        kitsch killer
                        • Sep 2006
                        • 37852

                        I figured, because it has a different title in English. Yes, one of the best books on the absurdity of the Soviet Union.
                        Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

                        StyleZeitgeist Magazine

                        Comment

                        • MJRH
                          Senior Member
                          • Nov 2006
                          • 418

                          I stumbled across this poet reading The Rosy Crucifixion. Miller speaks highly of him in a brief aside. Moishe Nadir. He has a beautiful sense of humour. This poem was translated from Yiddish, and I've kept the same punctuation. From "From Man to Man". (I don't think he's been mentioned here before.)

                          exercise in philosophical paradoxes ♦ a thing which is not cannot not-be ♦ only a thing which is can not-be ♦ thus one must say that even a thing which is not also is a bit ♦ if not then it could not not-be ♦ a thing which is not is ♦ and thus it is possible that it may also not-be ♦ but as a thing which is cannot not-be we must therefore say that a thing which is not is ♦ and therefore can not-be ♦ and therefore is ♦ and therefore isn't ♦ and therefore is ♦ oh I have such a terrible headache
                          And the following is from Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll pataphysician, by Alfred Jarry.

                          LOVE
                          The soul is wheedled by Love who looks exactly like an iridescent veil and assumes the masked face of a chrysalis. It walks upon inverted skulls. Behind the wall where it hides, claws brandish weapons. It is baptized with poison. Ancient monsters, the wall's substance, laugh into their green beards. The heart remains red and blue, violet in the artificial absence of the iridescent veil that it is weaving.
                          ain't no beauty queens in this locality

                          Comment

                          • asdf123
                            Member
                            • Jan 2010
                            • 49

                            Originally posted by Faust View Post
                            I figured, because it has a different title in English. Yes, one of the best books on the absurdity of the Soviet Union.
                            Yes, the book is a 'one breath read' like I like to call it. Although its a depressing critique there where parts where I was laughing especially when I was reading the 'cocktail recipes' part. Its vulgar yet poetic, takes you from puking to Immanuel Kant. I find it to be a story about essence of life, the ups and downs and how we are all taking our 'drunken souls' for a ride called life.

                            On the side note the interesting detail is that Yerofeyev when he published his poem withheld that the book should cost 3 rubies and 62 kopecks witch was an equivalent of a bottle of vodka in Russia of 1970's.

                            The book is one of my favorites for sure. Although it was addressed to USSR reality witch changed its really timeless.

                            Next up:
                            J.P. Eckermann - Conversations with Goethe
                            Imre Kertész - File "K".
                            and maybe another read of Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections (profound stuff).

                            Comment

                            • eleven crows
                              Senior Member
                              • Mar 2011
                              • 546

                              gogol seems to get a bit of hard time. i like him though. the terrible vengeance owned in a naive way.

                              reading post office now. actually got some laugh out loud moments.

                              Comment

                              • trentk
                                Senior Member
                                • Oct 2010
                                • 709


                                Originally posted by Eugene Thacker
                                Briefly, the argument of this book is that “horror” is a non- philosophical attempt to think about the world-without-us philosophically. Here culture is the terrain on which we find attempts to confront an impersonal and indifferent world-without-us, an irresolvable gulf between the world-for-us and the world-in-itself, with a void called the Planet that is poised between the World and the Earth. It is for this reason that this book treats genre horror as a mode of philosophy (or, perhaps, as “non-philosophy”). Certainly a short story about an amorphous, quasi-sentient, mass of crude oil taking over the planet will not contain the type of logical rigor that one finds in the philosophy of Aristotle or Kant. But in a different way, what genre horror does do is it takes aim at the presuppositions of philosophical inquiry – that the world is always the world-for-us – and makes of those blind spots its central concern, expressing them not in abstract concepts but in a whole bestiary of impossible life forms – mists, ooze, blobs, slime, clouds, and muck. Or, as Plato once put it, “hair, mud, and dirt.”
                                "He described this initial impetus as like discovering that they both were looking at the same intriguing specific tropical fish, with attempts to understand it leading to a huge ferocious formalism he characterizes as a shark that leapt out of the tank."

                                Comment

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